In the drilling and completion industry, safety valves are commonly used. One of the inviolate concerns for safety valves is that they fail closed. More specifically, any failure of the safety valve system should result in the valve closing or staying closed. Another result would be undesirable and flow would not be as easily controlled and might result in excessive increase in costs for the operation.
Safety valves that are most ubiquitous employ hydraulic actuation systems. These work well for their intended purposes but suffer from the foot print needed on a rig to support the required hydraulic fluid and pumps needed to effectively and legally employ hydraulically actuated devices related to the borehole. Pressurizing the fluid requires equipment that must be housed but even more impactful on space is the hydraulic fluid that must be stored due to local regulations in many places. More particularly, many local regulations require three times the volume of hydraulic fluid expected to be used in order to remain in compliance with the law.
The art would be receptive to any systems that avoid the need for hydraulic actuation.